Laura Archera Huxley, a lay therapist, author and widow of Aldous
Huxley, who shared his vision of human potential and devoted the
nearly five decades since his death to preserving his legacy and
helping others -- particularly children -- achieve happiness, died
Thursday at her home in the Hollywood Hills. She was 96.

The cause was cancer, said Dan Hirsch, a longtime friend.

Huxley met her husband in 1948, 16 years after his anti-utopian
novel "Brave New World" had established him as a formidable
thinker, writer and social critic. She married him in 1956, a year
after the death of his first wife, and over the next seven years
was his muse and partner in the explorations of consciousness that
helped to spark the psychedelic movement of the 1960s.

After his death in 1963, on the day of President Kennedy's assassination,
she was determined to keep his works from slipping into obscurity.

"What Laura Huxley did was devote her life and energy and vision
to making sure this very important writer in the Western canon was
still in print and widely published," said Jonathan Kirsch,
the attorney for the Huxley literary estate.

One of her last projects was to bring "Brave New World" to
the movie screen. It is now in development with a major motion picture
studio, Kirsch said.

Huxley also was the author of several books, including an early
self- help guide, "You Are Not the Target," a 1963 bestseller.
She also wrote "This Timeless Moment," a 1969 memoir of
her life with Aldous; "Between Heaven and Earth" (1974); "One-a-Day
Reason to be Happy" (1986); and "The Child of Your Dreams" (1987).

In 1978 she founded a nonprofit group now called Children: Our Ultimate
Investment, which aimed to foster optimal development of what she
called the "possible human." It collaborated with schools
in California and in Britain, working particularly with teenagers
to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

Huxley, who never had children of her own, once described its goal
as "bringing children up loving the world, rather than fearing
it as many children do."

When she met her husband, Huxley was nearing the end of the first
phase of her life -- as a concert violinist. Born in Turin, Italy,
in 1911, she was a musical prodigy who performed for the queen of
Italy when she was 14.

She came to the U.S. in the 1940s to make her American debut at
Carnegie Hall. She wound up in Los Angeles, where she played for
the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a few years. In 1948, spurred to
make great changes in her life after the death of a close friend,
she gave away her violin and went to work as a film editor at RKO
studios.

She met the famous writer when she was trying to promote a film
she wanted to make about the Palio di Siena, an annual horse race
through the streets of Siena, Italy.

Director John Huston told her that if she could get Aldous Huxley
to write the screenplay, he could help her obtain financing.

She wrote to the author, who had spent time in Italy and was then
living in the desert outside Los Angeles. When she got no reply,
she was a bit miffed.

She found his phone number and called him, unaware that the number
belonged to a post office near where he lived. "They asked me
if it was an emergency," she recounted to the London Guardian
in 2002, "and I said, 'Of course it's an emergency.' " The
message got through, and she became a close friend to both Huxley
and his wife, Maria.

After Maria died of cancer in 1955, he proposed to Laura in a roundabout
way, asking if she had "ever been tempted by marriage." When
she said yes, he asked, "Do you think it might be amusing to
travel to Yuma and get married at the drive-in?" She again replied
affirmatively and they were married at a drive-in wedding chapel
in Arizona.

By then he had already begun experimenting with psychedelic drugs,
particularly mescaline. (His 1954 book on his experiences, "The
Doors of Perception," inspired Jim Morrison and his bandmates
to name themselves The Doors.)

He invited Laura to take LSD with him while listening to Bach's
Fourth Brandenburg Concerto and they experienced "aesthetic
revelations."

But unlike their friend, Timothy Leary, who became the guru of a
generation that turned on and dropped out, Huxley said she and her
husband believed that while LSD had great potential for expanding
consciousness, it should be used "very carefully and religiously."

As a character in his last novel, "Island" (1962), said,
such a drug "can take you to heaven but it can also take you
to hell."

When Aldous Huxley was dying of cancer, he asked his wife to give
him a dose of the drug and she complied with two injections a few
hours apart. He died peacefully shortly after the second dose. As
she wrote of his last moments in her memoir, "I had the feeling
that he was interested and relieved and quiet."

When he was writing "Island" she was working on her first
book, "You Are Not the Target," a distillation of ideas
she had been developing since the late 1940s about how to promote
emotional health. She described her philosophy as recipes for life
and offered exercises that would help people relieve stress and find
joy.

One such exercise recommended tensing one's stomach muscles after
encountering a rude driver.

Another exercise was called "You Are Attending Your Own Funeral" and
encouraged participants to review their life and let go of regrets.

She created her foundation after the granddaughter of a lifelong
friend came to live with her for a week in 1978. Huxley told The
Times in an interview that year that the child's visit "threw
me into a state of expanded consciousness. I wandered through the
house feeling great love and compassion."

Karen Pfeiffer, the child who opened up new vistas for Huxley, helps
direct the foundation in Los Angeles. She recalled Huxley, who became
her legal guardian, as "the most beautifully eccentric person
I've ever known."

Among Huxley's many brainstorms was a room in Venice that she called
the caressing room, where people could come to hold babies. She regarded
it as a place "where the new and the old will meet and loneliness
will dissolve," she wrote in a description of the project in
1978. She said there should be such a place on every city block.

Well into her 90s, she worked out an hour a day on a treadmill and
could balance herself on a rubber exercise ball. She practiced yoga
and extolled the benefits of seeing the world upside down, standing
on one's head.

Asked many years ago why she never had children of her own, she
replied, laughing, "I never thought I was old enough to have
one."

In addition to Pfeiffer and Pfeiffer's daughter, Kaya, she is survived
by a nephew, Piero Ferrucci of Florence, Italy, and a niece, Paola
Ferrucci, of Turin, Italy.